Texas Carries Out Nation’s First Execution of 2017

Texas carried out the nation’s first execution of 2017 on Wednesday night, putting to death Christopher Wilkins, who was convicted of killing two men who tricked him into paying $20 for a piece of gravel that he thought was crack cocaine.

Mr. Wilkins, 48, was declared dead at 6:29 p.m. at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, The Associated Press reported. A last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court was denied.

Before he was administered a fatal dose of pentobarbital, Mr. Wilkins mouthed, “I’m sorry” to his victims’ relatives, who were watching through a window, The A.P. reported.

Mr. Wilkins was convicted in 2008 of killing Willie Freeman and Mike Silva in a phony drug deal in 2005. Mr. Freeman and another unidentified man had fooled Mr. Wilkins into paying for the gravel that he thought was crack, The Dallas Morning News reported. And when Mr. Freeman laughed about it later, Mr. Wilkins fatally shot him and Mr. Silva.

At his trial, Mr. Wilkins testified that the day before those killings, he had fatally shot another man, Gilbert Vallejo, outside a bar in Fort Worth, Tex.

He also said he did not care if he was sentenced to death. “Look, it is no big deal,” he said on the witness stand, according to The Dallas Morning News.

A survey released in September found that Americans’ support for the death penalty was declining. For the first time in 45 years, support dipped below 50 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

Last year, only five states carried out executions: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri and Texas. Over all, states executed 20 people in 2016, down from 28 in 2015. Both numbers are modern lows, and are drastically reduced from the 98 executions in 1999, the peak year since the 1950s, according to a report from the Death Penalty Information Center.

Like other death-penalty states, Texas has faced a shortage of the drugs used to carry out death sentences partly because their manufacturers, many based in Europe, will not allow their sale for such use. States have often turned to compounding pharmacies, which are largely unregulated by the federal government, to create the supplies of drugs necessary to execute prisoners.

Last week, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued the Food and Drug Administration over the federal government’s decision to block the state from importing the anesthetic thiopental sodium from a foreign distributor.